Practice is limited to criminal defense and civil rights; has defended dozens of murder cases.

In 1996, defended Allen Johnson in the state's first death penalty prosecution in Albany County since the law's reinstatement a year earlier. Kindlon challenged the prosecution's decision to pursue death penalty. He charged that prosecutors pursued a first-degree murder charge only because the victim of the drug-related stabbing was the cousin of a secretary for the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case.

The district attorney later abruptly dropped the death penalty pursuit. Johnson was convicted of second-degree murder in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison.

It will be the second time Kindlon and Albany County Assistant District Attorney Michael McDermott have faced off in a murder case. In 2003, Kindlon won an acquittal for Herbert Flowers, who was accused of murdering a man in a Cohoes nightclub.